Today's Vocab Word

(Courtesy Penn & Teller's Bullshit series)

Pareidolia (pron.: parr-i-doh-lee-ə) is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant, a form of apophenia. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse.

Learn something.

That Can't Be Good (updated)

I took a shower and just hung out on YouTube for a while, and this is what I got when I went back to FB.

What kinda high school fuck-around has Mr Zuckerberg been up to now?

Uh-oh, Andy.

(update)
OK, so maybe I wasn't being sufficiently paranoid.  Maybe I shoulda thunk they was spyin' on me fer the gubmint.  Sorry - I'll try to remember to freak out a little more next time.

Steely Dan Unearthed

A kind of paean to Owsley Stanley (aka Bear), without whom "the 60s" might never have happened - or at the very least, without whom "the 60s" may well have been very very different indeed.

Here's to those noble few Legacy Pukes who figure out how to turn normal.

Access Is An Important Thing

I'm always going on about infrastructure.  I'm a Keynesian after all, and I know the thing that gets us pulled out of the big dumper is when we spend a lot of money on some big fuckin' thing or another - dams or highways or parks or whatever.  Because we have to have access - to capital and to markets and to raw materials and all the stuff that makes it possible for the stuff we wanna sell to get to everybody else who's busy trying to sell stuff.

When I'm thinking about these things, it starts to make some sense to me that an inability to come to terms with our idolization of firearms means that Guns now comprise the basic infrastructure for Crime and War and Suicide and way too many other self-destructive behaviors.

At about the 3:40 mark, Hayes tells us about a guy who survived jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, saying, "I still see my hands coming off the railing...I instantly realized that everything in my life that I thought was unfixable was totally fixable - except for having just jumped."

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We put up all kinds of nets and cables and plexiglass thingies on bridges and other Suicide Infrastructure trying to make it a little harder to gain access to the means of our self-ushered departure - why can't we figure out something to do about the guns that make for 20,000 Dead Americans every year?

Everything is totally fixable except for having just pulled that fucking trigger.

Today's Eternal Sadness

And I guess I'm wondering where the 2nd Amendment Meatsitcks are.  Why aren't they jumping up and down screaming about protecting that woman's rights?  If she can be charged with all that criminal stuff just because some stupid little kid was messin' where he didn't belong, then what hope do the rest of us have to protect ourselves from an intrusive gubmint?  What about the personal responsibility of that kid!?!

But wait - I almost forgot - the response is always tailored.  So this one will be spoken in soft reverential tones.  Something like, "That woman's a sinner and God has punished her for straying from the path of the righteous - but that precious little boy is another fallen hero; a martyr to the cause of Freedom, and we mustn't use this tragic and isolated incident for political purposes - we must keep silent during this time of prayer and reflection blah blah fucking maudlin blah."

hat tip = Addicting Info

Today's Gun Nuts - With A Side Of Stoopid

A quick look at some of the real-America law-abiding responsible gun owners who generally don't show up in the commercials or the NRA's brochures.

And an all-time favorite:



One last thing - these people vote.

The KrugMan Speaks

If you read just one post today, let it be this one by Paul Krugman at NYT:

So the story isn’t “irresponsible politicians will always squander the good years”; it is “conservative Republican politicians run up debt even in good years, because they want to force cuts in social programs.” Kind of a different story, isn’t it?

The point, then, is that the seemingly worldly-wise cynicism that seems to be the last defense against the economically obvious is in fact based on an imaginary history that looks nothing like what actually happened.

Ezra Gets One Right

Not that he's wrong all that often, but sometimes Ezra Klein has a truly annoying tendency to shade towards Centrism.

Anyway, his main point here is that it's important to remember:

If you’re around policy research enough you’ll end up reading a lot of studies that violate your intuitions, your theories, your hopes, and even your values. You’ll have the instinct to brush them away or come up with some reason they’re wrong. In those moments, I was told, it’s worth remembering that the world isn’t here to please you.

Politics isn’t here to please you either. And this, I think, is the core of the debate over whether “presidential leadership,” whatever that actually means, can fix Washington.

It's a pretty good post from his blog at WaPo.

Today's Carlin

George Carlin addressing the language of politics.

"...how much soft money can I expect to collect in exchange for my core values?"



Fuckin' genius is all he ever was.

hat tip = Crooks & Liars

Joining The Chorus

I just want to add my own bit to the crowing of "The Left" in the last few days.

Unemployment is kinda down - but down.

The Dow is way up - closing Friday at just under a new record high.

So let me say it along with everybody else who still has a couple of living brain cells rubbing together - if this Obama guy is actually a Commie Fascist hell-bent on destroying the foundations of capitalism and ending the glories of our American traditions, then he really really really sucks at it.  Get the fuck over yourselves.

Can you imagine what we could make happen around this joint if we weren't constantly fighting a political headwind manufactured by an obstructing Congress?

"Conservatives" are always going on about "burdensome regulations".  Well, guess what - the Regulators are the ones who won't let anything good happen; the ones who "stand athwart history and say, Stop!".  They're the people who deny reality by saying there's nothing to this AGW thing;  the Regulators are the ones who keep us forever chained to Saudi kings by blocking every effort to move toward renewables;  they tell us that the 2nd Amendment means ensuring Smith & Wesson's profit margin is more important than the lives of our kids. and on and on and on.

Regulators tell us that if we just cut down on spending, then spending will go up.  Honest - that's what "austerity" comes down to.  And it's no different than the bullshit they tried to peddle about how Bush's monster tax cuts would actually increase tax revenues and make everything so much better.

It's the Big Bamboozle and it has to end.  These pud-knockers are takin' a giant shit on our heads and expect us to go on saying, "Thanks for the hat."  Enough already.

Today's Wingnut

Our returning champion - Glenn Beck, everybody!



Why does it always come down to the Reichstag fire, and why does it never occur to these guys that - oh, I dunno - maybe we could consider Occam's Razor or something?  I'm not sayin' ya gotta be perfectly reasonable like normal people, but couldn't you gimme one clear moment every 4th or 5th time out?  I'm also not saying we should just automatically eliminate all possibility that the guy was set up and/or egged on by somebody who's deeply embedded in Obama's nefarious plot to destroy America (or whatever the fuck these boneheads like to jack off to late at night on a random Friday), but c'mon - at least gimme somethin' new once in a while.

Words To Live By

Don't be the Crack Spider's bitch.

Today's Phobia

Hey, you kids...you're makin' a mess - go outside and play.

Think you got problems?

Yes, Virginia

...there is corruption in Richmond.  A lot of it.



hat tip = Blue Virginia

Today's Eternal Sadness

Charlie Pierce gets it.

So, tout le monde — as we say around the still in the holler — is talking about the very tragic events down in old Kaintuck', where you can kilt you a b'ar when you is only three.

A five-year-old boy in the southern US state of Kentucky has accidentally shot dead his two-year-old sister at the family home. He had received the rifle, specially made for children, as a gift last year.

A rifle, specially made for children. Think about it. Some sales rep at a gun manufacturer pipes up at a sales meeting, "Hey, maybe there's a market for kiddie guns! No, I mean real guns. With bullets!" Everybody cheers and the guy gets a raise, and nobody stops for a second and says, "You know, we don't trust our five-year olds with matches. Maybe guns should wait until, I dunno, middle school." Anyway, roll that one around in your head for a second as we continue into our regular feature, This Week In Responsible Gun Ownership:

Reports say the weapon had been kept in a corner and the family had not realised it still contained a bullet.

And from a commenter:

Yeah, well, we don’t know the whole story, do we? Maybe his sister was threatening him with her gun. In that case, then the gun may well have saved his life. You know what they say, the only thing that stops a bad three year old with a gun is a good three year old with a gun.

And BTW - when is it not a good time to talk about what we can do together about trying some small thing to make things just the tiniest bit better for ourselves?  I can't be the only one who sees "let's not politicize this tragedy; it's too soon to talk about gun control; we should respect the family's grief" as the perfect dodge.  Cuz guess what - we can absolutely count on the simple fact that another kid will be killed with a gun before somebody decides it's OK to start talking about gun control, and so the clock is constantly being reset to zero, and nothing will ever get done.

If you think it's OK for little kids to have guns; if your ideology or your party loyalty requires you to close yourself off and "stand firm with your 2nd Amendment Rights" in spite of knowing that tens of thousands of American families are forever broken every year because you're just too fucking stoopid to learn anything new about the US Constitution in particular or the world in general - then please raise your hand and I'll be happy to come over and slap Wayne LaPierre's dick outa your mouth for you.